Inside EuroBSDCon 2004

During the final weekend of October, nearly 200 people attended EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany. The event offered a keynote by Apple's Jordan Hubbard, 23 talks organized in two tracks, a social event inside Luigi Colani's exhibition, and multiple coffee breaks to socialize. ONLamp.com writer Federico Biancuzzi attended; here's what he saw and heard.

Keynote

Saturday morning, the big event was Jordan K. Hubbard's keynote. He's
the manager of BSD Technologies for Apple
Computer Inc., perhaps the most envied job among BSD developers. I can't
prove this, but if a lot of people talked with him face to face for the whole
weekend, I think that there should be a good reason. Jordan started with the
common myth "BSD is dying," and showed us that it's completely false. Thanks to
Mac OS X, BSD is the most famous
Unix on desktops, and yes, there are more BSD than Linux boxes.

Jordan kept pushing the button on innovations. Where is the alternative
thinking? In the Linux world, if there is a new hardware, idea, or project,
there's always someone who stands up and start working on it. Maybe that person will not
complete what he or she started or maybe the result will be of low quality, but at least
someone tried to contribute. This doesn't happen in the BSD world. Jordan made
the example of the virtual network
interfaces patch for FreeBSD, written by Marko Zec. It is essentially a proof of a
concept and needs more work, but development hasn't yet progressed.

Figure 2. More of Jordan
Hubbard's keynote.

Even if most of his examples came from FreeBSD, Hubbard talked about systrace
from OpenBSD and NetBSD on iPod. Yeah, you read right. He mentioned
that BSD is missing a port for hardware architecture without a MMU, and he invited
the NetBSD folks to work on that.

Figure 3. Still more of
Jordan Hubbard's keynote.

The slide in Figure 3 has a very interesting detail: a mobile phone. Can we
expect a BSD powered iPhone?

I had the impression that he wanted to let us know about a porting of some
music tools (iTunes?) when he asked
why FreeBSD still has a naive audio framework. He said that if developers think
that users only want to listen to MP3s, well, okay. Otherwise, we can do
better.

At the end of the keynote, there was a funny Q&A session followed by long
applause. By the way, Sunday afternoon, I asked Jordan if he really uses a
one-button mouse. I don't know how to write his answer without creating
problems, so I won't repeat what he does with bundled peripherals. However, let
me say that he uses keyboards and mice built by a company with an Italian
president...

Talks and Meetings

There were a lot of talks divided in two tracks, so occasionally I had to
choose between two wanna-see speeches. Pity.

I found all the different ways we spoke English to be fascinating. You know, now
we are a community (E.U.), and it's amazing
listening to accents and sounds from other language speakers. I felt part of
something bigger than a nation, language, or frontier, and I hope that others
felt it too. I don't want to write details for every speech I've attended
because the EuroBSDCon organizers promised
to put all off the slides and papers on the EuroBSDCon 2004 website. I hope they
have already done so when this report comes out.

During a coffee break, I joined a conversation between Poul-Henning Kamp and the two
Italian FreeSBIE developers. We
discovered that Poul worked in Italy for a famous company called Olivetti, and he still
remembers how good the Italian food was.

Then I talked with Scott
Long about FreeBSD's bad habit of missing release deadlines. He said that
the situation would change, and in fact, a few days later he posted a
plan for time-based FreeBSD releases. I hope that beyond the plan to
release more often, there will be a stronger desire to respect deadlines. I hope
his badge featuring "Long Scott" wasn't a bad signal. ;-)

In the afternoon, I talked with Hubert Feyrer about
NetBSD. We discussed the idea to build a multiboot DVD and the fact that Federico Lupi disappeared from
the internet (where have you gone?). Then he told me that they were going to
release the new
NetBSD logo. I was excited...until I saw it. It's not bad, but I don't
think it solves all the problems written in the
new-logo-contest-announcement. NetBSD needs a mascot that satisfies those
rules and, most importantly, represents NetBSD only. I had an idea, but I don't
draw well.

Moving among conference rooms, I looked at every badge I could and discovered
a lot of people I've heard of. There were a lot of known developers; matching
the personalities you understand from their mail and their appearances was a
funny experience. Some have long beards, some have tics, some like being
barefooted, some have ergonomic support for their laptops via their tummies,
some dress very elegantly and some very casually (maybe dressing in the
dark?). Most of them like beer.

I met Dru Lavigne. I think
she was shy, but I was shy too, so we talked...we said very few words. However,
she autographed my copy of BSD
Hacks, and I gave her a copy of the Italian magazine for which I manage the
BSD section.

One of the first people I recognized was Greg Lehey. I saw his photo somewhere on
the internet. Because he had a long beard, I was soon pretty
sure he was the famous grog.
I asked for an autograph on my copy of The Complete FreeBSD. He
looked at my pass to find my first name and then used it for the dedication. I
think he was the only one who wrote it correctly. Most people I meet outside
Italy write it Frederico...

The Conference Ends

Sunday at 16:00, the closing session started. After a short "thank you, no,
no, thank you, no, thank you!" between organizers and attendees, the awards for
best papers went to:

Thus, the conference officially ended. A lot of people left the hotel soon
afterward; only a few stayed in the room until 18:00. Then, most of them moved
toward dinner. I know it's not exactly the time of the day for dinner for most
of the people, but hey, that's Germany.

Matteo Riondato and I joined the group led by Greg "fast-feet" Lehey. He
started walking with fast and long steps even while wearing sandals and the
group had to be fast enough to follow our guide toward the dinner place. It was
a nice moment. When I began my travel, I'd never imagined that I'd have spent
the evening drinking beer with all those famous people. Guest stars: Dru
Lavigne and her daughter, Greg Lehey and his wife, Erwin Lansing and a lot of
other people, but sadly I don't remember all the names.

The restaurant explaned that for every ten 1.5-liter carafes we bought, we
would receive a free one. Obviously we accepted the challenge even though we were
only a dozen people. Here you can see the first beer round...

Figure 5. Beer with dinner.

This is just a part of the team. Please note the meticulous attention used
to pour the beer.

After some time, Greg, Dru, and others left the brasserie, and so we invited
some people from other tables to join our own. Here you can see the result of
this successful joint-venture operation.

Figure 6. Further beer.

A new type of engineer is born: the EngiBeer!

Musings on Next Year

At 23:00, I said goodnight to head to the train station. During the night
travel home, I was thinking that the conference was a good event but without
a clear targeted audience. I heard people discussing the next conference
to be held in Switzerland and a possible 2006 version in Italy. I started
wondering: who should attend EuroBSDCon? Developers? Users? Advocates?
Anyone?

I think we should think about it. As Dru said in her EuroBSDCon weblog, most
people at the conference talked to each other for short moments and then returned
to their groups, sometime a group of friends, sometimes a group of
same-language-speakers, or developers of a particular BSD project. Can't we use
a moment like this in a better way? I'm not suggesting to transform it into
something like an OpenBSD hackathon, but maybe we should try to use this rare
opportunity to make different BSD projects interact more.

What about users? How can we use this yearly conference as a marketing tool
if it costs a 200 Euro fee? How much do travel, hotel, and conference tickets
combined cost, 400 Euros? I know a lot of people around Europe that couldn't
afford all the costs since most are students. They stayed at home. This is
bad. How many times can a BSD user meet a lot of developers in the same place?
I think we should promote this opportunity and use it to arouse enthusiasm in
new users. If you were a newbie, would you prefer to hear Robert Watson presenting FreeBSD or
Mr.Foobar from a local user group?

Federico Biancuzzi
is a freelance interviewer. His interviews appeared on publications such as ONLamp.com, LinuxDevCenter.com, SecurityFocus.com, NewsForge.com, Linux.com, TheRegister.co.uk, ArsTechnica.com, the Polish print magazine BSD Magazine, and the Italian print magazine Linux&C.